Ohio Rep. John Boehner, the House minority leader and chairman of the convention, said the legally required business, including approval of the rules and the platform, would take place but “there would not be much beyond that.”
Its the right thing to do. It would be improper and insensitive to have a giant party (which is essentially what a national convention is) until we know the scope and scale of this storm.
The hurricane’s going to hit New Orleans about the time they start. [Chuckle] The timing is — at least it appears now that it’ll be there Monday. That just demonstrates that God’s on our side. [Laughter] … Everything’s cool.
That would be former Democratic National Committee Chairman Donald Fowler telling us how hilarious Hurricane Gustav is.
Keep this in mind when the DNC issues character attacks on McCain and Palin over the next several months.
* Wow. No matter who you are and who you support, you cannot help but be impressed by this pick, if only because it is so unconventional and was so out of the blue. At a time when Americans should conceivably be dwelling upon Sen. Obama’s Super Bowl-sized acceptance speech the night before last, Sen. McCain has grabbed everyone’s attention by selecting a running mate no one seriously thought was a possibility. If the axiom that “there is no such thing as bad publicity” is at all valid, the McCain campaign had a good day.
* Gov. Palin excites the base exactly when it needs to be excited — heading into the Republican convention next week. Not only is she a bona fide conservative but she has a remarkable life story of achievement, the paramount item of which is her becoming America’s most popular governor by taking on the entrenched and corrupt establishment in her state. In that sense she undergirds Sen. McCain’s reputation as a reformer.
* Obviously, this pick is a risk. Time will tell if she is up to a tough national campaign and will be able to acquit herself favorably in her debate with Sen. Biden. If her remarks in Dayton, Ohio yesterday were any indication though, she’ll do just fine.
The long-term effects of Sen. McCain’s selection of Gov. Palin yesterday will obviously not be revealed until the late hours of November 4, 2008. But in the short-term, it has created a buzz around the McCain-Palin ticket on the eve of the convention next week, where Gov. Palin will get the first real opportunity to introduce herself to Americans and demonstrate her capacity to become the nation’s next vice president and help Sen. McCain build upon the momentum they have created in recent weeks.
In his acceptance speech yesterday evening Sen. Obama declared once again, to paraphrase, that he will end the Iraq War “responsibly.” He neglected however to point out that if he had had his way the United States would have retreated from Iraq in defeat months ago (surprise of all surprises!), or that the only reason we can even contemplate leaving responsibly in the near future is because we adopted the surge policy he asserted on multiple occasions would fail to bring both physical security to Iraq and consequent political progress. It in fact brought both.
Sen. Obama’s disingenuous rhetoric cannot hide the fact that if we had followed his judgment America would have lost a war, and the consequences would have been terrible and far-reaching. But because we adopted a policy that adhered to Sen. McCain’s judgment, America is very near an incontrovertible victory in Iraq.
And Sen. Obama thinks he’s even close to being prepared to be Commander-in-Chief…
Obama, Biden, Pelosi, and Reed not a moderate amongst them; this will be who is running the American government if Senator Obama is elected in November. This shouldn’t only concern conservatives and Republicans, but should be on the minds of moderates and independents too. There frequently is a desire to answer lopsided power on one side with an imbalanced push for lopsided power on the other side. However, a stable sound government is often best achieved from the middle. Swings left or right are normal and to be expected, but a far left or far right government doesn’t truly serve or reflect the American people. The beauty of a McCain presidency is that the government would be balanced. Even the most optimistic Republican doesn’t think Democrats will lose control of the Congress. That means the executive branch would be controlled by a Republican who has a history of working in a bipartisan manner with the Democrats who would control the legislative branch. This is the sort of practical reasonable government that turns down the volume on the bitterly partisan rhetoric of the last couple decades, and gives America a government more reflective of the mixed red, blue, and purple worlds most of us live in.
Next week I will be blogging from the Republican National Convention. Thanks to Blogs for John McCain’s Victory, and the RNC I’ve been granted a press pass to cover the event. As I joked with one person, I’ll need go find myself glittery flag apparel, and a straw hat covered with McCain stickers so that I can appear appropriate. None-the-less, it’s very exciting to cover this event, and I plan to post frequently at Blogs for John McCain’s Victory, Purple People Vote, Blogs4McCain and NH4McCain.
Also, I’d like to ask readers for their input. Is there any part of the convention that you would like to see? Do you have any questions you would like asked? I’ll do my best to provide a view of the convention not normally seen in the main stream media, and hope I can provide answers to readers questions. Hope you’ll check in frequently, and thank you for visiting/reading.
John McCain is pulling ahead of Obama. The latest Reuters poll has Grandpa Munster up five percentage points over our secular messiah. The Real Clear Politics average of polls has Obama and McCain in a virtual tie. And, according to RCP, if the race were held today and McCain took the toss-up states where he’s currently ahead, he’d be the next president. Yes, it’s early. McCain has had a good couple weeks. But these were McCain’s first good couple weeks since he secured the nomination. Meanwhile, with the exception of the Jeremiah Wright unpleasantness, Obama has had a good couple years.
The winds at the Democrats’ backs are hurricane-force gales, and yet there’s Obama holding steady, like a young Dan Rather in his schoolgirl rain slicker, immobile and unmovable.
Ask the typical Obama supporter why this should be so and you’ll get a range of answers. Some just stare at the poll numbers the way my late basset hound would look at me when I tried to feed him a grape: with pure unblinking incomprehension. Others act like the guy who sits alone with his shopping bags at the public library, muttering about Fox News conspiracies and how Karl Rove-like aliens are doing terrible things with probes of proctological exactitude. Still others just shake their heads at the racism of anyone who could possibly have a problem with a very left-wing politician with almost no experience, who often sounds like his campaign slogan is: “People of Earth! Stop Your Bickering. I Am From Harvard, And I’m Here To Help.”
Perhaps therein lies the answer to this supposed mystery. Indeed, perhaps there’s no mystery at all, and Obama’s problems are the same problems Democrats always have at the presidential level: He’s an elitist.
Oh, I know. Upon reading that, some liberal spluttered herbal chai tea from her nose at the injustice of this whole elitist canard, and the earnest Ivy League interns at some liberal magazine have burst into laughter, offering the appropriate bons mots from Balzac at the preposterousness of such a suggestion, saying: “Don’t you conservatives understand? Democrats care about the little guy. They’re on the side of the proletariat — I mean workers — and as Obama has so eloquently put it, if the workers would only stop clinging to their silly sky god and guns, they’d understand that.”
Liberalism is often a problem at the presidential level. Cultural liberalism is a burden. Haughty cultural liberalism is a disaster in the making. For good or ill, the presidency is a cultural institution as much as it is a political institution. And it’s fundamentally a culturally conservative one. Fair or not, many perceive Obama as a cultural outsider. This week, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said of Obama’s friendship with former left-wing domestic terrorist Bill Ayers: “They’re friends. So what?”
David Brooks is out with an interesting op-ed asserting that Sen. Obama is not ahead of Sen. McCain at the moment to any discernible extent because, essentially, voters can’t put their finger on him:
There is a sense that because of his unique background and temperament, Obama lives apart. He put one foot in the institutions he rose through on his journey but never fully engaged. As a result, voters have trouble placing him in his context, understanding the roots and values in which he is ineluctably embedded.
Mr. Brooks makes some good points, but I think the reasons Sen. Obama is not polling at a level commensurate with the generic Democrat is that he’s young and inexperienced and Americans simply are not sure if he is an American president. They’ve heard his platitudes but want something concrete that can allow them to vote for him in November. The fact that he is hard to put a finger on has been exacerbated by the fact that he’s done so many about faces since he became presumptive nominee that undecided voters are befuddled as to where he stands and who he is — and liberals are even pointedly asking him to stick to liberal orthodoxy.
They aren’t getting much from Sen. Obama at the moment, and what they are getting is plain dissonance. That is why he is not blowing Sen. McCain out of the water in a year that frankly there is no reason he should not be.
